This is a slice of my philosophical, lay scientific, musical, religious skepticism, and poetic musings. (All poems are my own.)
The science and philosophy side meet in my study of cognitive philosophy; Dan Dennett was the first serious influence on me, but I've moved beyond him.
The poems are somewhat related, as many are on philosophical or psychological themes. That includes existentialism and questions of selfhood, death, and more. Nature and other poems will also show up here on occasion.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

The varieties of infinities, or why heaven won't work

I'm an avid nonfiction reader. So, especially at larger libraries, I just head to the new books display and grab what I want ...

While at the same time, knowing I can't read every book I want to.

That
has an analogy to Western monotheisms' view of a perpetual,
individual-soul afterlife. (Hinduism and some other religions besides
the Judeo-Islamo-Christian tradition may fall here, too, but I'm focused
on them.)

The analogy? Has roots in one Georg Cantor and the mathematics of infinity.

If you have any familiarity with this, you know there are different infinities of sets, such as

א-null, א-one and א-two. Well, picture your or my individual
infinite life in heaven as א-null. Well, if the “set” of א-null is multiplied
by itself, we get א-one, a different level of set-infinity. Arguably, even though
the number of people in the Western version of heaven, with no procreation,
will be finite, one could still say that all the works they will produce will
be something like א-one to an individual person’s א-null.

So, heaven would be a sort of “bounded infinity,” and,
aside from medieval Christian notions of the real greatness of heaven being to
bask in the glory of god, we would see our individual infinities as essentially
“bounded.” That, in turn, would be a sort of psychological pain.